You Cannot Be Serious!: The 101 Most Frustrating Things in Sport. Matthew Norman

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      How fitting that Cash recently became tennis’s youngest grandfather. The whiny tone to his tennis punditry, the classical ocker sexism and the sub-Blairite attempts to cling to his youth by playing electric guitar suggest a man at least three decades older than his forty-five years.

      Plagued by the confusions that causing mild offence is a substitute for wit and grinning cockiness is indiscernible from winsome charm, Cash’s specialist impertinence is ignorantly dismissing tennis players of infinitely greater talent and spirit than he ever showed. Allied to this is a rare talent for being wrong. To take one memorable example, early in 2007 Cash wrote a piece, headlined ‘Serena is Lost Cause’, in The Times, attempting to nudge the younger Williams sister towards retirement and describing her as ‘deluded’ for imagining she had a future at the top of the game. ‘When Serena Williams arrives in Australia on her first foreign playing trip in a year,’ began the world-weary elder statesman, ‘and announces that it is only a matter of time before she is again dominating the sport, it’s time to tell her to get real.’ Two weeks later, as you will already perhaps have guessed, Serena annihilated Maria Sharapova 6–1 6–2 in the Australian Open final

      Getting real seems a habitual problem for Cash. His own journey into retirement was not the gracious swansong he advocated for Serena. Far from it, the embittered grouch on annual display in the BBC’s wretched Wimbledon coverage had an early run-out. He took deep umbrage at the failure of tournament directors and the ATP to give him wild cards late in his career, when the rigor mortis had set into his game. The therapy that followed did little to improve him.

      There have been sporting pundits who endeared themselves by forever complaining that things ain’t what they were (Freddie Trueman comes to mind) and scratching their heads until the scalp bled in mystification at modern ways. Cash is not among them. While he may choose to regard his vinegary carping about the venality and amorality of current tennis as the refreshing bluntness of a straight-shooter, it is in fact purely the self-pitying rancour of the nasty old geezer in the nursing home wash-clean plastic chair, muttering ‘Dunno they’re born’ at anyone under sixty who appears on the telly. ‘Nobody wanted anything to do with me,’ he sniffled once of the indifference shown to him in the dog days of his playing career. You know just how they felt.

      84

      Richard Keys

      Strictly speaking, this emblem of blazer-clad corporate loyalty – a man who would lay down his life, you suspect, in the cause of Sky Sports – should be of more interest to anthropologists than anyone else. Now that the advent of high-definition television has obliged him to shave his hands to spare the feelings of more squeamish viewers, this is no longer as obvious as it once was. But there was a time when his fronting of broadcasts raised grave doubts about the professionalism of the Ape Recovery Squad at London Zoo.

      His own professionalism has seldom been in doubt. He anchors Premier League transmissions with a seldom-wavering dull competence unleavened by his slavish commitment to talking up what he routinely refers to, despite its transparent recent decline, as ‘the best league in the world’. This rare example of a cliché without a shred of truth (Spain’s La Liga has always had the edge in everything but the capacity to induce preposterous hype) is not, of course, his alone. The BBC propagates it with barely less fervour. The difference is that, where Gary Lineker is capable of admitting that a Premier League game was less than scintillating, Mr Keys is not. Supported by whichever permutation of pinhead pundits the afternoon or evening spews up, his devotion to his employer and the domestic competition that is its cash cow compels him to talk up every match as if it were a classic.

      Being easily entertained is an enviable gift, but there comes a point at which it becomes hard to distinguish from an illness. The reassuring news for fans of Mr Keys is that he is in fact perfectly well, and finds much of the football as soporific as the rest of us, as a rare cock-up established in 2007. ‘Daft little ground, silly game, fuck off,’ was his verdict, unwittingly broadcast, on a Scottish trip to the Faroe Islands, lending a piquancy to the many times he has prissily apologised, as Sky presenters must, for profanities uttered by interviewees or bolshy tennis players.

      If he could dredge up the same candour when aware that the microphone is live, and show some respect for an audience that may be marginally less thick and pliable than he imagines, it would improve him no end. But then, honestly appraising football matches is not his function. Sky Sports is the public relations arm of the Premier League, and Richard Keys its regrettably missing link between a PG Tips primate and Max Clifford.

      83

      Harold ‘Dickie’ Bird

      In the absence of an ‘uncle’ or schoolmaster showing undue interest in his development, the cricket-fixated boy of the 1970s knew no more unwanted an authority figure than the then doyen of Test match umpires.

      It would be an exaggeration to claim that Dickie ruined my childhood and early adolescence, but his heightened fears about the weather condemned me to countless summer days of needless boredom. If he had an inkling in his bones that a raincloud drizzling over central Turkmenistan was contemplating a move in a westerly direction that might take it over Headingley by mid-November, he’d take them off. If the light dipped by one iota below the level required to read the bottom line of the optician’s wall chart from forty paces, off he would take them.

      Sweet-hearted as this eternal schoolboy seemed to be (even at seventy-seven years old you imagine him curling up under the bedclothes with his torch and a copy of Wisden), a searing pain in the bum he undeniably was. His morbid terror of making mistakes led to him routinely rejecting LBW shouts which Hawkeye today would show travelling like guided missiles towards the middle of middle stump. The surest method of avoiding mistakes, of course, was to avoid the playing of any cricket, which may explain why reports of a small shadow at deep fine leg at Sabina Park or the ’Gabba would have him taking them off at Edgbaston.

      In retirement, alas, the endearing fussbucket nerviness of old mutated into something less lovable. Dickie Bird the umpire became Dickie Bird the National Character, and this dubious role he embraced without a shred of the neurosis he had lavished on unconfirmed reports of cloud movement in Chad. The success of his autobiography, imaginitively entitled My Autobiography, went to his head. The sweetness was replaced by a mild strain of egomania that persuaded him to keep raiding the same tiny storeroom of tales for the joy of a listening public that had perhaps been sated by hearing them the first time.

      The Peter Ustinov of the bails appeared to have precisely three hilarious stories from his decades behind the stumps, which he recycled with identical stresses, timing and breathless delight in their drollness. There was the one, from his late career, when Alan Lamb (‘Lamby’) handed him a mobile phone to look after while he stood at square leg, and he was then side-splittingly rung mid-over by Ian Botham (‘Beefy’). There was the one about turning up at the Palace to collect his MBE fourteen hours before the ceremony. And there was the one about being invited for lunch at Geoffrey Boycott’s house, no one answering when he rang the bell by the gate, having to climb a wall to gain admittance, and then being palmed off with cheese on toast.

      Perhaps there were others the mind has blanked out, much as it supposedly does the pain of childbirth. But it is Dickie Bird’s most remarkable achievement that in his anecdotage he came to make you wistful for the days when he used his mouth for no other purpose than to mutter ‘Not out’ as a ball that pitched on middle stayed on middle, and to engage his fellow umpire in urgent consultations about the threat posed to the continuation of play by a sandstorm in the northern Sahara.

      82

      Mervyn King

      If Mr King is the raging Caliban of darts, perhaps he has sound cause for his fury. The prospect of a footnote СКАЧАТЬ